She was standing close to the window now, and she put her hot face against the glass. "The problem is easy enough, if all think alike--if one does not think at all; but now? I cannot follow my own conscience and my father's too. We do not think alike. Is it right that I should, to buy his approval and smiles, violate my own mind, and brain, and heart? But is it right for me to violate _his_ sense of what is right, while I live upon the lavish and loving bounty which he provides?" And so, with her developed conscience, and reason, and individuality, Gertrude had come to face the same problem, which, in its more brutal form, had resulted so sorrowfully for the two girls whom she had hoped to befriend. The ultimate question of individual domination of one by another, with the purse as the final appeal--and even this strong and fortunate girl wavered. "Shall I swim, after all? Have I the right to try?" she asked herself. XII. When Francis King told Mr. Avery that she could and would leave her father's home and live upon the money she earned, and had heretofore looked upon as merely a resource to save her pride, she did not take into consideration certain very important facts, not the least of which was, perhaps, that her presence at the store was not wholly a pleasant thing for the cashier to contemplate under existing circumstances. Francis King was not a diplomat. The cashier was not a martyr. These two facts, added to the girl's scornful eyes, rendered the position in the trimming department far less secure than she had grown to believe. So when she came to the little room which Gertrude Foster had provided as a temporary home for Ettie Berton, she felt that she came as a help and protector and not at all as a possible encumbrance. "I've had a terrible blow-out with pa," she said, bitterly. "I can't go home any more if I wanted to--and I don't want to. I told him what I thought of him, and of your--and of the kind of men that make mean laws they are ashamed to have their own folks know about and live by. He was awful mad. He said laws was none o' my business, and he guessed men knew best what was right an' good for women." "Of course they do," said Ettie with her ever ready acquiescence. "I reckon you didn't want t' deny _that,_ did you Fan? You 'n your pa must a' shook hands for once anyhow," she laughed. "How'd it feel? Didn't you like agreein' with him once?" Francis looked at the child--this pitiful illustration of the theory of yielding acquiescence; this legitimate blossom of the tree of ignorance and soft-hearted dependence; this poor little dwarf of individuality; this helpless echo of masculine measures, methods, and morals--and wondered vaguely why it was that the more helpless the victim, the more complete her disaster, the more certain was she to accept, believe in, and support the very cause and root of her undoing.